Is it an argot or jargon or is it some highly divergent regional dialect of English?

Because it seems to be utterly unintelligible as standard English (to me as a BrE speaker), I'm guessing the former at the moment. Is it thieve's cant (of the Elizabethan variety if you want a more specific answer)?

I'm going to give this one, as it is an argot/cryptolect based on English. In fact it's Rechtub Klat, which as the name suggests is the backslang-based argot used by Australian butchers. And given that, you should be able to translate it:

eSOANEM wrote:Ok, I'm out of sensible guesses for Indo-Aryan languages (unless it's really very obscure) so I'm guessing it's Dravidian. Tamil seems a bit too obvious once people have narrowed it down to Dravidian for that. I'm going to guess Kannada because IIRC, the region it's spoken is one of the most heavily Muslim parts of Southern India.

It is Dravidian, but it's not Tamil or Kannada.

In that case I suppose Telugu is the next one to guess (although at this point, I'm just going through the Dravidian languages in order of decreasing numbers of speakers.

Based on the fact it has both ɲ and c, it looks like it has pretty much a full palatal serie although, besides approximants, it seems to only have nasals and plosives. The lack of fricatives seems very unusual indeed though.

Thanvbda vbyne Nasif felv myns yɬth lyMasavchan byn Iylvl bydinario yl [stuff, assumed to be a price] fy lythychleth vybvny Annobal chylyv5v(?)bylndsiana chvlam[/quoteThe texts are unrelated but belong to the same language, the only capital letters used are to mark proper nouns.]

OK, it looks Celtic. Clearly people who are in contact with Romans judging by the Roman numerals and the reference to "Licini Piso". The reference to Hannibal as well makes me think some kind of Celtiberian?

You're going to need to be more specific on the first. I think I'll have to give you the last one though (even though you ruled it out); it was Punic but post-second-Punic-war. I'd been desperate to find a Punic sample for ages. I don't really know much about Semitic languages so can't really comment on why it might not look very Semitic but I'd guess it's a combination of the age of the sample and influence from Rome after the war.

I don't have much of an idea with the first one, but the second's use of <'> looks like hard signs to me (combined with the fact that the word rusijilykin looks like it could be related to russia) makes me think this language is usually written in cyrillic and is spoken primarily in russia or neighbouring countries,

The lack of any apparent long vowel marking makes me think it probably isn't one of the uralic languages in russia. I don't think it's slavic (other than the one -evky ending, none of the endings look very slavic to my eyes) and it seems to be missing some of the vowels I'd expect if it were turkic. I'm not sure what <è> represents and I think that'd be the main thing I'd need to work out to get further.

That said, reading a bit more deeply, it looks like some of the uralic languages in russia have lost contrastive vowel length so it could be one of them I guess. At the moment I think that'd be my best guess, but I don't think it's mordvinic (it doesn't look like moksha to me and erzya doesn't seem to have enough vowels).

Hint: the first one is from Africa. You can tell from the use of <ɛ>, <ɔ> and <ɣ>, which come from the Africa Alphabet.

For the second one: you're right, it's from Russia, and it's not Slavic or Turkic. I used the scientific transliteration of Cyrillic, so <e> represents <е>, and <è> represents <э>. Also notable are all the instances of <ԓ> (<l̦>), which represents a lateral fricative. Simple <л> is only found in Russian loanwords in this language.

Opipik, I'm super impressed. I can't be more specific but I think both of your submissions are Australian languages. If pressed, I might say the second is from the Western Desert family, but I'm not as sure about the first.